As capabilities of computer systems have increased, the amount of data that is generated and computationally managed in enterprises (companies, educational organizations, government agencies, and so forth) has rapidly increased. Data may be in the form of emails received by employees of the enterprises, where emails can often include relatively large attachments. Moreover, computer users routinely generate large numbers of files such as text documents, multimedia presentations, and other types of data objects that have to be stored and managed.
Data management performed by an enterprise includes data backup, where certain data in the enterprise is copied to backup storage systems to protect the integrity of the data in case of failures or faults. Another form of data management is data archiving, wherein some subset of data is moved to separate storage systems. However, storing large amounts of data is associated with various costs, including storage media costs, power and cooling costs, and management costs.